scholarship application: write about a famous villain & why viewing their humanity’s important
intro when you think of yolanda saldívar, you picture a bitter old bitch stuck in her little carcacha, tears gobsmacked to her cheeks, holding a pistol to her temple, howling, i didn't mean to hurt her. my heart is a weapon that acts alone. maybe you hear the sirens around her. see the police officers standing beside their cars, pistols whipped out & ready to shoot. you'll probably focus on blood & bullet holes, a body on the floor, selena quintanilla leaking—first onto the pavement. her insides, oceandeep. collected by forensic teams & then later scrubbed away by a hotel maid, who may be humming one of selena's tunes: cause i'm dreaming, of you tonight.
body you'll see the ambulance: the medics administering oxygen into selena's mouth, placing white bandages onto her abdomen, q-tipping her wounds. you won't detail the surgery or count all of the wormholes the doctors make into selena's body because you'll picture selena's mother, eyes puffy, fists clenched around crumpled tissues, screaming at nurses, please, please let my baby stay. you'll only have a flash of her father, see how he's splitting his lip open with his teeth. your thoughts will whisk away by the heart monitor going flat in the operating room, loud. startling. perhaps even louder than the bullets yolanda shot into selena, because a heart beat lost is louder than anything.
conclusion you want yolanda to rot. to stay in jail. maybe you even hope she kills herself. it's what she deserves, you say. how else can you hang up your teardrops to dry if she's still alive? & i'll tell you this: people are hurricanes, like my tia ninfa, who i used to mistake for yolanda growing up because they share the same face. a woman who pushed my mother down a flight of stairs during a fight, a woman my siblings ran from, a woman who once gently caressed foam out of my eyes in the bath, & said. mijo, it's okay to be soft. not like other boys. you just have to remember: you have a sun inside you. hold your hand to your chest to feel its warmth. don't ever let someone steal it. promise me.
"as a selena fan, i never ever EVER thought i'd write about yolanda saldívar, nor did i ever think i’d write about my tía ninfa—a woman who has caused so much harm in my life. with my tía’s health in decline, i’ve been asking myself what good can i hold of her when she’s gone—& writing about yolanda is my attempt at finding tenderness in her violence."
When Sarah Messer interviewed poet Franz Wright their conversation ranged from his first poem to the nature of language. "Very early, I had the sense of language as being a literal place or somehow doubling everything. If the infinite can be doubled, which it can’t. It’s an impossible mathematical proposition, but that’s what it does. Language doubles the infinite."
Resources for Supporting and Uplifting the Black Community
Know Your Rights Camp: Colin Kaepernick founded this organization that holds education seminars across the country for black and brown youth. Know Your Rights Camp teamed up with defense lawyers in the Minneapolis area to help provide legal resources for those in Minnesota in need right now.
Black AIDS Institute: The mission of the Black AIDS Institute is "to stop the AIDS epidemic in black communities by engaging and mobilizing black institutions and individuals in efforts to confront HIV."
The Conscious Kid: "An education, research and policy organization dedicated to reducing bias and promoting positive identity development in youth. We....promote access to children’s books centering underrepresented and oppressed groups." See, for example, Black Books Matter: Children's Books Celebrating Black Boys.
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"I thought about the future—and the shores my daughter would stand on—every time we played in water. Play with a young child is always about the objects themselves, but at the same time always seems somehow allegorical. A story unfolds. Ideas about the world are exposed: Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub…."
